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The oldest and perhaps the most fondly remembered form of interactive writing for readers of my own generation is almost certainly the variety of branching, disjunctive storytelling made popular by the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books for children, which were first published back in the late 1970s. I was the first kid in my fifth grade class to own one of these (it was called THE CAVE OF TIME, the very first book in the series) and it changed hands very quickly amongst my classmates. When we first learned BASIC on the Commodore 64 by best friend and I would spend hours composing huge, branching narratives that ranged from the mildly pornographic to the merely incoherent. It has occasionally struck me as rather sad that this form of storytelling never really captured a wider audience as a result of the PC revolution. In a sense Infocom trumped amateurs like my buddy Chris and me by designing word-by-word parsers that allowed for games with a much higher degree of interactivity than our rather feeble efforts. But "multiple-choice" storytelling still has its own distinctive charms, and lately a couple of programmers have provided the IF community with the tools that we need to explore these attractions in greater depth.
My friend Okey in Boulder, Colorado, has put together a really spiffy-looking little multiple-choice adventure engine that's currently available for public scrutiny at
The version at this site contains about 40% of a game with text written by yours truly. It's called DRAGONLORD, and it ain't Tolstoy, but it's mildly funny, and it gives one a fairly good idea of the capacities of the engine. At the moment there's no easily useable interface for writers who want to use this engine, but Okey tells me that he's interested in the long run in developing a library of games for his engine. Be sure to keep tabs on his website for updates on the state of this snappy little executable. Jon Ingold, author of the recently circulated, widely praised INFORM game "The Muldoon Legacy" has undertaken the more ambitious project of designing a multiple choice game engine that comes equipped with an editing program for writers to use without having to produce any code themselves. This program can be downloaded from At present the engine seems to still have a few kinks in it - I can't get it to run on my PC, at any rate. But if this application could ever be made to work, it would be a wonderful contribution to the IF community, and to writers who still bear some nostalgia for the old days of thumbing back and forth through those ingenious little paperbacks when they were growing up. Go To Page: 1 2
The copyright of the article Multiple-Choice Adventure Engines in Interactive Fiction is owned by Mark Silcox. Permission to republish Multiple-Choice Adventure Engines in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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